


The Shadow Line

by LemuelCork



Category: Philip Marlowe - Chandler
Genre: M/M, Mexico
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemuelCork/pseuds/LemuelCork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of THE LONG GOODBYE, Marlowe tells us pretty emphatically that he never saw Terry Lennox again. This seems improbable to me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shadow Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nny/gifts).



_You can never know too much about the shadow line and the people who walk it._   
_—Raymond Chandler_

They don’t have woodpeckers in Mexico, they have Ivorybills, but you wouldn’t know the difference by listening to one take its feelings of inferiority out on the wall beside your head. I opened my eyes to find that the sun hadn’t quite come up yet. It was inching its way toward the top of the Cerro de las Abejas with no more enthusiasm than a schoolteacher on the first day of classes. There were still traces of last night’s rain on the window glass, and near the top two fat droplets hung, trying to decide which would start the long, slow crawl to the bottom first. It was a race neither one of them could win.

I tossed aside the blanket and climbed back into the pants I’d left hanging over the arm of the chair. It was made of wicker and shellac, and aside from the bed it was the only furniture in the room. You paid extra in Tijuana if you wanted two chairs, and there weren’t enough pesos in the city to get you a table.

My wallet was still in my pocket where I’d left it and when I opened it to check I saw the proper number of folded dollar bills on one side and the miniature Photostat of my license on the other. My gun was in its holster, and a quick inventory revealed a bullet in each chamber. You might attribute this lack of overnight larceny to the honesty of the good, hard-working citizens of Tijuana, but you would be wrong. I didn’t know what to attribute it to, other than the bad weather. Second-story men don’t like to work in the rain.

I made my way down to the lobby, resisting entreaties from the elevator boy to let him show me around town. "You can’t abandon your post," I told him. "It would cost you your job."

"Some job," he said with a sneer, looking from corner to corner as though in search of a good place to spit. "Anyway, they let me take breaks, señor."

"Save them up," I said. "Give yourself the afternoon off."

Out front, the street was already busy. A young girl took hold of my sleeve before I’d set both feet on the pavement. "Come, mister," she said in a soft voice, "you come see my papa’s zebra. You can take picture. Two pesos."

I shook her hand off my arm. "No camera," I said.

"One peso," she said and looked up at me hopelessly. Her eyes were no larger than bicycle wheels, and you couldn’t count more than a dozen ribs through the faded fabric of her shirt. My hand ducked into my pocket of its own accord. It found a peso coin I hadn’t even known was there.

She took it and latched onto my sleeve again. "Zebra?" she said, nodding.

I’d seen Tijuana zebras before. Every American who ventures south is offered the opportunity. They’re the result of an enterprising program of cross-breeding between a donkey and a bucket of paint. "Thanks," I said, freeing my sleeve again. "Try someone else."

She came forward a third time—you don’t survive on the streets of Mexico by taking no for an answer. But this time my jacket swung open and the holster must have been roughly at her eye level because she stopped dead and looked up at me with an expression that told me all I needed to know about her lifetime experience of men with guns. She backed off a step, then turned and ran full-tilt down the street, vanishing around the first corner she came to.

I did the same, only at a more measured pace and in the opposite direction. The neighborhood cantinas weren’t open yet and wouldn’t be until the heat of the day made their services indispensable, but one peddler with a pushcart and a giant metal urn was doing a brisk trade in sweet rolls and mugs of steaming, bitter coffee. I slipped the photograph out of my inside jacket pocket and showed it to him between swallows.

"One moment, señor," he said, holding up an index finger to indicate how many moments he meant. He tipped the urn forward and worked the spigot to refill the mug of a workingman in paint-smeared khaki pants.

"Muchas gracias," the man said. He had the build of a wrestler or a stevedore, but the same soft voice as the little girl. I wondered if this was papa, he of the zebra farm.

"All right, señor," the peddler said, turning back to face me, and he pushed his glasses higher on his nose. "Let us see this photograph." He looked at it, tilted it slightly from side to side. "No, señor. I don’t think I have ever seen this man."

"You’re sure?" I said, and handed him a dollar.

"Quite sure," he said after a moment. He handed the photograph back to me. He kept the dollar. "I would remember."

This was true. For all the violence you could witness on the streets of Tijuana, it wasn’t every day you saw a man with knife scars along both sides of his face, and when you did it was more likely to be a tough, down-at-heels Pachuco than a man like the one in the photograph, with his patrician features and dainty eyebrows. "He goes by Maioranos," I said. "Cisco Maioranos."

The peddler shook his head. "I do not know him, señor."

You get lucky sometimes. The first person you show a photograph to says, "Yes, of course, that’s Mr. Smith. He comes by every Tuesday at four. Look, there he is now!" When it happens, you raise a silent hymn to St. Teresa of Avila, patron saint of headaches, for sparing you one. But it rarely works out that way. People haven’t seen Mr. Smith, or pretend they haven’t; they don’t speak English, or pretend they don’t. You ask and you ask, and you get nothing for your trouble other than raised eyebrows, apologetic expressions, and doors shut in your face. And St. Teresa does her worst. She’s a diligent worker, that St. Teresa. By noon she’d given me one of her Grade A specials.

Fortunately, by noon the cantinas were open, and I sat at the bar in the largest of them, wearing a track in the condensation on the side of a beer glass with my thumb. The photograph of Señor Maioranos lay beside the glass, and when I saw the bartender looking at it, I rotated it to face him.

"You know this man?" I said.

The bartender took my glass, refilled it, and set it down again. He looked me in the eye and didn’t answer my question.

"When did you see him last?" I said.

"I didn’t say I know him," the bartender said.

"You also didn’t say you’re not Anita Ekberg, but I’ll trust the evidence of my eyes."

"What do you want from him?"

"An old friend of his asked me to give him something," I said. The bartender’s eyes narrowed. "Not what you’re thinking. Just a letter."

"Let me see," he said.

I reached inside my jacket and pulled out enough of Starr’s envelope that he could see the corner with the return address written on it in pen. _Randy Starr, Terrapin Club, Las Vegas, N.V._ Starr had given it to me at the same time he’d given me the photo, which he claimed was the only one in existence. It may well have been. The one time Señor Maioranos had come to visit my office I hadn’t reached for my Leica.

The bartender seemed still to be mulling it over.

"Sometime before the tide goes out," I said.

He shrugged, then pulled out a rag and began using it to polish a section of the bar that looked no duller than any other. "He has been here a few times."

"How many?"

That got me another shrug. "Five, six."

"What has he ordered when he’s been here?"

"Gin," the bartender said.

"Straight?" I asked.

He shook his head. "With lime juice."

A gimlet. It was as good an identification as finding a fingerprint. But the bartender had another.

"His hair doesn’t look like that anymore," he said, aiming a thumb at the photograph. "It’s all white now. That must be an old picture."

"Not so very old," I said. I thought of the one time I’d seen him with the dye in his hair. Together with the plastic surgery it hadn’t been a bad disguise. I guess he felt enough time had passed, that he didn’t need to pretend to be a Mexican anymore. The news reports of Harlan Potter’s death might have had something to do with it. I assumed they’d made the papers even down here where Potter hadn’t owned them all.

"So," I said, "do you know where I might find him?"

"Last I knew, he was living over on Del Volcán," the bartender said, "near the park. I had to...help him home once."

I nodded, remembering our first encounter. And our second. "Yes, that sounds like Señor Maioranos."

The bartender looked honestly puzzled. "Señor Maio...?"

"Well, what name did he give you?"

"Marston," the bartender said. He stopped polishing, slung the rag back under his belt. "One thing I can tell you, the man is no Maioranos. He is like you—a gringo."

I left a couple of bills beside my glass. I got up. "He’s a gringo, all right," I said. "He’s nothing like me."

#

The avenue was near enough to the water to appeal to American travelers but far enough away that you were spared the racket of boat engines and of hawkers shouting for attention. You still got the smell of salt and from time to time the wind would slap you across the cheeks like a rival inviting you to a duel. The park the bartender had mentioned was a long narrow stretch of green starting at the edge of the beach and ending at the edge of the highway four blocks east. A winding footpath led between the dusty trunks of tamarisk and jacaranda, and in the center a beach umbrella the size of a sideshow tent spread its shade over a half dozen wooden chairs. In one, a man was dozing with a cat at his feet and a woven straw hat pulled low over his eyes. The cat kept craning its neck as people walked past, clearly wishing someone would bring it indoors. I knew how it felt.

The bartender hadn’t given me an address and it wouldn’t have helped any if he had, since none of the houses had numbers. What he’d given me was a description of the building at whose door he’d deposited Mr. Marston the night Mr. Marston had had too many gimlets to manage to stagger home unaided. I found it without any difficulty, the only three-story house on a block otherwise devoted to one-story buildings and fenced-in empty lots. In the States, there would have been a panel showing the tenants’ names together with a buzzer for each, to activate the house phone. And in the States you would have needed it, because the front door would have been closed and locked. Here it was helpfully propped open with a broken cinderblock.

"He was on the first floor," the bartender had told me. "On the left. I saw the light go on." The light was off now, or maybe it just didn’t show in the daytime. Heavy curtains were drawn in the windows. When I went inside and knocked, no one came to the door.

I took a close look at the lock. It was a Rabson, a respectable American make, which probably made this the best-protected apartment on the entire block, if not in the entire municipality. The door itself was made of wood and looked as though it would withstand one or two swift kicks, but probably not three. I didn’t do it. I knocked again.

This time, footsteps sounded on the other side. They started out quiet and then got louder before stopping directly on the opposite side of the door. I pictured him standing there—Cisco Maioranos, Paul Marston, Terry Lennox, and who knows how many other names he’d tried on over the years. Quite a crowd for a one-room apartment in Tijuana off the Avenida Del Volcán.

"Terry—" I began. But I heard another sound before I got any further. It was the sound of the hammer of a revolver being pulled back.

I dropped to my belly on the hallway carpet as the wood of the door exploded outward in a shower of splinters. The explosion that went with it rang in my head like a gong. Somewhere under my jacket I could feel my holster and in it my gun, but I couldn’t seem to untangle the weapon from the fabric surrounding it. Nice way to go, Marlowe: shot to death in a hallway in a Mexican rooming house because you couldn’t get your gun out when you needed it.

I rolled onto my side, freeing my right arm, and yanked my jacket open; a thread snapped and my jacket button went spinning out of sight. Out of the corner of one eye I saw a pair of brown leather wingtips swiftly approaching and I looked up in time to see a PPK leveled at my face. I didn’t look any farther. There was no point. There was a gun; there was a trigger; a finger was on the trigger, tightening. I wanted to say something, something that would stop him, but talking wasn’t the way you stopped bullets, whatever they might tell you in the halls of diplomacy. Not when you have a gun in your hand, too, and only seconds to live.

I swung my arm up, past the other gun, past the hand holding it, to a broad chest clad in a silk shirt and necktie. A broader chest than Terry’s. A man might get fat living in Mexico, but he couldn’t give himself broader shoulders or a bigger chest, not this much of one. I kept raising my gaze even as I jammed the muzzle of my weapon against the unfamiliar torso. Above was an unfamiliar face. "You’re not—" we both began, only he said it in Spanish.

We were both right: he wasn’t Terry Lennox and neither was I. But this revelation didn’t seem to stop him for more than a moment, any more than the fact that I’d been knocking at the door rather than using my own key had. He’d been assigned a job, to shoot the man who came to that door, and by god he was going to do it. His finger, briefly stilled, began tightening on the trigger once more.

But when the gunshot came, it wasn’t from his gun, nor from mine. The gunshot came from the pistol wielded by the man standing behind my broad-chested assailant, a man wearing denim trousers and a linen workshirt and a woven straw hat, with an overheated cat lolling in the crook of one arm. The bullet tore through the other gunman’s chest, spraying blood against the wallpaper. His hand slackened and his gun tumbled to the floor. I leaned out of the way as the body fell forward and collapsed beside me.

The cat leaped out of the man’s arm and scurried into a corner as far from the action as possible. Once again I knew how it felt.

The man swept the hat off his head with the hand still holding the smoking gun. Under it I saw the white hair, the knife scars.

"Well," Terry said. "Hello there, Marlowe."

#

We dragged the dead man into his room, left him on the floor beneath the curtained windows. A quick search of his pockets revealed nothing in the way of identification. No wallet, no tags on his clothing, not even a library card. Torpedos south of the border didn’t used to be so careful, but lately they’ve been learning from their cousins up north. When you go out on a job, you leave anything with your name on it at home. If the job ends well, you can pick it all up later, and if it goes as badly as this one had, well, what difference does it make?

We didn’t hear any sirens on the breeze, and this being Tijuana I knew we might never. There weren’t enough police to come running every time a gun went off. On the other hand, someone had sent this man to go wait in Terry’s apartment, and whoever it was might have stayed within earshot or scheduled a time to come back.

"Come," I said.

"You’ve got..." He made a gesture with his hand. "Blood on you."

I looked in the mirror over the washbasin standing in one corner and used a handtowel to wipe off the worst of it. The stains on my shirt and jacket were beyond repair.

I dropped the towel and took his arm. "We can’t stay here."

"No, I suppose not," he said. He looked around on the floor. "Now, where do you suppose Sylvia has gotten to?"

"Outside," I said. "Because she’s smarter than we are."

He followed me reluctantly. When we got to the hallway, the cat was nowhere in sight.

"Do you think she’ll come back?" Terry asked, and it dawned on me that he probably wasn’t entirely sober. Either that or he wasn’t entirely sane.

"I’m sure she will," I said. With one hand between his shoulderblades I steered him to the street. I flagged down a passing taxicab and shoved Terry into the back seat. "Go," I told the driver.

"Where to, señor?"

Where to. I gave him the name of my hotel and off he drove.

Terry was shaking his head. "Sylvia," he said.

I didn’t know what to say. "You named your cat after your dead wife," I said finally.

"You may not understand this, Marlowe," Terry said, "but I miss her."

I let it pass. "Here," I said, and I took out the envelope I’d been carrying around. Some of the dead man’s blood had gotten on it, but you could still read the address. "Randy Starr asked me to give you this."

"That why you’re here, Marlowe?"

"Yes," I said.

"I thought maybe you wanted to see me," Terry said.

"No you didn’t," I said.

"No, I didn’t." He ran a thumb under the envelope’s flap and pulled out the single sheet of paper it contained. He read through it in silence, then folded it, replaced it in the envelope, and handed it back to me. "You’ll never believe this, Marlowe, but Randy thinks someone is trying to kill me."

"Does he say who?"

Terry shook his head. "Just urges me to be careful. To ‘lay low,’ as he puts it. Lay low, Marlowe. Grammar be damned."

Randy Starr was an ex-Commando who had served with Terry in the war. Terry had saved his life—it was how he’d gotten half the scars on his face. The other half were the work of an ingenious plastic surgeon who couldn’t erase the first half but could give him a matching set.

"How much did he pay you to find me?" Terry said.

"Nothing," I said.

"Then why’d you do it?"

"I owed him," I said.

"And now you owe me," Terry said.

"For what?"

"Saving your life back there," Terry said.

"I’d have survived," I said.

"One of you would have," he said.

We were both silent for a while. Up front, the driver whistled reedily through his teeth.

"What do you want?" I asked.

He looked me over, bloodstains and all. "Now that’s one hell of a question, Marlowe. It is one hell of a question. You remember all those stories from the Arabian Nights, about genies and lamps and wishes? Did you ever daydream about having one?"

"No."

"I did, Marlowe. I used to make up lists. Of what I would ask for if I had three wishes. Do you use one to wish for wealth beyond measure? No, you can do better than that."

Spoken like a man who’d had wealth beyond measure—twice. And lost it both times.

"For happiness?" Terry shook his head. "Too soft, too...inchoate."

When I didn’t say anything he put a hand on my leg.

"You know what I put on my list, Marlowe?"

"No," I said.

"Would you like to know?"

"Not very badly."

"I decided what I would ask for if I ever found a lamp with a genie inside of it was for the genie to stay with me always. As a friend, you see. I thought, what a wonderful friend to play with a genie would be."

"How old were you?"

He took his hand off my leg. "Nine. Ten. I was a lonely child, Marlowe."

"And now?"

"Oh, you get used to it. Being alone."

The driver pulled the cab to a halt at the front door of the hotel. I half expected to see the little girl from the morning, but she was nowhere in sight. It was probably just as well, as the bloodstains would have confirmed the impression she’d formed of me earlier.

We rode the elevator upstairs. The boy I’d ridden with on the way down must have been on one of his breaks because the operator now was an old hunchback who kept one hand on the lever and his eyes aimed at the wall. He’d seen plenty of bloodstains in his day, and plenty of pairs of men riding up to hotel rooms together, and he’d learned it was best to look the other way.

While I opened my valise and took out a new shirt, Terry sat in the chair, one leg slung over its arm. I stripped off the ruined shirt, balled it up, and considered whether the undershirt had to go, too. I decided it did.

From the chair, Terry said, "I used to think you might be my friend, Marlowe. My own genie. Sit with me, drink with me, talk with me. Protect me from the cops. Take me home when I couldn’t make it on my own."

"It was nice while it lasted."

"I didn’t mean for it to end," he said.

"You made it end," I said. "You ended it."

"You know I couldn’t tell you I was still alive—"

"That’s not what ended it." I remembered Eileen Wade’s last words. She’d written a nice note, then gone and swallowed forty-six pills of Demerol. _Time makes everything mean and shabby and wrinkled,_ she’d written. _The tragedy of life is not that beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean._ "You know what ended it."

"What. Tell me."

I stood before him, a bloodstained shirt crumpled in each hand. He looked up at me. I watched his leg swing back and forth. "For a long while there, Terry, I thought you might be my friend too. I learned better."

"I never meant to deceive you, Marlowe. I never wanted to."

"You just did it."

"That’s right," Terry said. "I did what I had to, to survive. But I didn’t want to."

"Poor Terry," I said. "Poor, poor Terry."

He sprang out of the chair. "Poor Marlowe! Did I ask you to go on a crusade for me? Did I ask you to do any of it? I asked you to have a drink to remember me by, that’s all. And a cigarette. None of the rest of it. That was all your doing."

He was right, of course. And that was the worst part of it. No one had asked me to clear his name. No one had asked me to dig up all the dirt I’d dug. I’d just gotten myself a spade and started digging.

I threw the shirts on the floor, faced away while I unbuckled my belt. The blood would come off the belt—it was leather—but the pants had to go. It was a good thing I’d brought a second pair with me.

I heard his voice behind me, nearer by than I’d expected. "I’m sorry, Phil," he whispered. "I really am." His fingertips alit on my shoulder like a bird testing a branch to see if it would bear its weight.

I turned. He had his own shirt half unbuttoned, though there wasn’t a bit of blood on it. His skin had gotten naturally darker from months in the southern sun, and the sharp lines of his scars stood out in pale relief. I traced one of them with my thumb, from his ear where it began to the point of his chin. This was the one the Nazis had given him. The one he’d gotten for saving Randy Starr’s life. I could feel it against my fingertip like the edge of a page in a book, a page you’re coming to and about to turn.

"Who wants to kill you, Terry?" I said. "You know who it is, don’t you."

He nodded hesitantly. "I think so."

"You’ll tell me," I said. "You’ll tell me everything. No lies, no omissions. Everything."

He nodded again.

I moved my hand to the back of his head, felt the weight of his skull against my palm. He was not a small man, but his head felt small in my grip. Small but warm.

"Your cat’s not coming back," I said. I said it brutally. He shook his head slightly and I saw his eyes glistening.

"I’m not coming back either," I said. "I’ll find the men who are trying to kill you, I’ll deal with them, and then I’ll leave, and you’ll never see me again."

I could see he believed it as much as I did. I shook his head roughly. "Never," I said. "Just this once and never again."

He tilted his head back and his eyes slid shut and he found me with his hands. "My genie," he whispered.

#


End file.
